A History In Passing
by caithream
Summary: The world hadn’t changed much since the Winchesters had walked the earth, but his mother had remembered it a little differently and had made it a point to tell her sons so. Hell on earth, ultimately, absolutely, until they had intervened.


i.

One crushing moment, staggering in disbelief and everything suddenly fading with a sickening rush, leaving him strangled and helpless and slipping, only seconds, minutes later to come screaming back with such ferocity he feels his stomach heave, denial ripped from his mouth and simultaneously nailed deep into his heart. Breath shudders through a hollow shell, the deep thrum of his heart echoing that he has nothing, he has _nothing_. Understanding had slipped through his grasp before, as intangible as the wind, but now the inconceivable idea fills him to the brim and leaves him hanging, unable to breathe, unable to think.

He lets the device slip from his hand, and chokes.

ii.

The Winchesters had left quite a history behind, when they passed.

A lot of shit to wade through, really, everyone telling different stories from different sides, a lot of mixed up facts and tall tales stretched beyond belief. Everyone had wanted a piece of the Winchester pie when it came down to it, because hell, who wouldn't? Tales of heroism and bravery and a mystical air of _something else_ coming out of the woodwork from all around the nation as years passed. _The taller one, you know, he just jumped right in front of me and saved me, brought down that werewolf one-handed, swear to God_, or _The older one, he was a bit of a punk, runnin' his mouth like he owned the place, but when he whipped out that shotgun faster 'en I could blink and blasted that damn spirit clear off from six hundred feet, well that shut me up real quick_. Just a little bit of word-of-mouth that twisted and grew as it passed, until some things were just downright absurd.

Jeremiah was from Lawrence and liked to think himself an aficionado of all things Winchester.

Because, sure, maybe he was just a little bit fascinated. The world hadn't changed much since the Winchesters had walked the earth, but his mother had remembered it a little differently and had made it a point to tell her sons so. Hell on earth, ultimately, absolutely, until they had intervened and gotten themselves killed along the way. Saviors, she had said. Stupid and selfish, but saviors nonetheless.

When he looked up property deeds at the local library and saw that they had lived only three blocks from him, it was all downhill from there.

He learned what they had learned from the beginning, salting the base of the windows and teaching himself Latin, and was in the middle of memorizing the _Rituale Romanum_ when Ben smacked him on his head and asked him what the hell was going on.

It wasn't that Jeremiah was embarrassed, or anything, but there were just some things that people take a liking to (take a real _real_ keen liking to) that didn't necessarily need to be shared with the whole world. Or, you know. His brother.

"Oh, nothing" was going to cut it about once, and Jeremiah had a hell of a way to go before he became completely learned in whatever craziness the Winchesters had partaken in. From that point on, he stepped lightly.

Not for the first time, he wondered, as he twirled a pen in his fingers, just how exactly the Winchesters had died.

iii.

Through his mind-numbing grief one single ember of a thought lit his whole brain on fire, igniting hope and that all-too familiar prayer of desperation, and so he waits, listening for any whisper of indication. Desperation drives men to do things, believe things that were so seemingly out of the realm of possibility that it was absurd, but, like every epic story told through history, one little shining sliver of hope was all that was needed, and he will wait until the Second Coming if he has to, no more willing to give up hope than he would his own memories.

There is nothing left for him now, nothing, emptiness and heartache suffocating and weighing him down like a heavy winter coat, and he sits for hours in his darkened room before realizing there is nothing but the sound of his own shaky breath filling the silence.

He will wait.

iv.

Their mother had died the year Jeremiah was to graduate with his Masters from the U of K. Both devastated, Ben moved in with him, but Jeremiah suddenly had a problem. The Winchester family research was scattered throughout the apartment, not to mention two shelves full of dusty old tomes and manuscripts with freaky titles and even freakier subject matter.

Still, if Ben ever stumbled upon it, maybe he would think it was all research for Jeremiah's History thesis. If not… well, maybe he'd just tell Ben he converted to the Occult. Any way to freak out a little brother.

The pieces of the Winchester's lives were coming together, slowly. Odd connections kept springing up between some of the towns they had visited and the people they had saved. Patterns of destruction in others, similar to the brief note in a farmer's almanac in 1983 of abnormal weather patterns for that year and then again some years later. Once, he found a newspaper article from a small town in Wisconsin, praising two mysterious men who had arrived in the town just in time to save a prominent local law enforcement's grandson from drowning.

Their elusiveness and ability to seemingly drop off the face of the earth for years at a time was just the icing on the cake, really. As irritating as it was, Jeremiah found himself more than a little awed.

He had been trying for a while now to get his hands on the leather-bound journal they had carried around with them, rumored to originally be their father's. And John Winchester… well. That was just another whole can of worms.

Older folks still living around the old Winchester home remembered the horrible fire that had taken their mother. Hard not to, really, when all investigations for the fire had come back completely inconclusive. Started in the baby's _nursery_, of all things, and as baffled as the police were, John Winchester, it seemed, was not one to just sit idly by. All of his old coworkers at the auto shop he'd worked at were either dead or long gone from the state except one, and he had said Winchester had just taken the boys and left not long after a brief sojourn at a friend's house, all remaining possessions stuffed into the trunk of that old car, the boys tucked sleepily into their new home. He hadn't seen them since.

And then… silence. Nothing heard or seen of them for a few years, not until he found a record of Dean, the older son, registered in Kaskaskia, Illinois. Elementary school. And then in Charlotte, North Carolina the next year, and Medford, Oregon nearly two years after that. And then Sam, the younger, entered the picture, when Dean was in middle school, moving, moving, constantly, each town they'd lived in and towns surrounding them ceasing in tragic and unexplained deaths not long after they arrived. All supernaturally inclined, obviously, and even though Jeremiah knew that, he wondered if the people still living in those towns had ever had any idea. Probably not.

History had always been Jeremiah's strong point, gathering and soaking in facts and geography like a sponge, and he'd always taken a liking to learning about the more human aspects of historical facts, as difficult as it was to come by. Sure, he could drudge up the dates and battles of the Civil War just as fast and easy as he could the alphabet, but those were just the cold hard _facts_. There was no human emotion or grief behind those dates, no lingering images of bloody men scattered on the field on the names of those battles. Facts could not tell stories; people could. Agonizingly enough, it worked the same way with the Winchesters. Jeremiah gathered, as best he could, the cities and towns they'd left their mark on over the years, penned the _what_ and _who_ and _where_, but never the _why_ or _how._ How, exactly, did this family function, with what they did? The only written words straight from the Winchesters' hands that Jeremiah knew of was the leather journal, if anything. That was the problem with history: so impersonal.

And then somewhere along the line their father had either died or somehow completely left the picture, Jeremiah wasn't really sure. The former was more obvious, and as he wrote a note in his own paperback notebook, he wondered if the boys and their father had been close. What kind of a toll it took on them when their father disappeared, and what exactly _had_ happened to John Winchester. Jeremiah rubbed the crick in his neck and frowned.

"Hey!" Ben called from the next room. "You gonna have dinner sometime within the next year, or what?"

"I'm _coming_, Ben, I'm just finishing up something in here, okay?" Jeremiah couldn't make out Ben's grumbled reply, but he was sure it something along the lines of _finishing up_ meaning _two more hours._

Jeremiah sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. It wasn't fair to Ben for Jeremiah to lock himself up in his study like this, especially after their mother's death. Ben had been closer to her, but that didn't mean Jeremiah didn't share some part in the grief, though his methods of dealing with it had been different from Ben's. Like intently studying which methods were best in disposing of an aswang, and other creatures of the same ilk.

He didn't coddle, but neither did he stray too far from his brother's side. For weeks Ben had stuffed it all down into a miserable silence that made Jeremiah feel helpless and on edge, but he didn't know what else to do besides wait. Jeremiah knew something had changed between them when at one point his stomach was rolling in absolute despair, though not at his mother's death, but instead at coming home one evening and finding Ben hunched over on the couch, knuckles digging into his eyes to keep the tears from streaming. There was little Jeremiah could say without sounding like a complete idiot, so he just grabbed the box of tissues from the counter and pulled his brother's shoulders close, next to his own. Neither of them mentioned it the next morning.

So, okay, fine, maybe he should abandon the tangled web of research early, just this once. There was still that one niggling matter, though, that stayed with him long after he closed up his notebooks and yellowed tomes.

Whispers and rumors had floated around over the years about an honest to God _demon_ the Winchester boys had killed. Not exorcized, not sent back to hell, _killed_. How in the hell they had managed to do so was beyond any of those who had passed on such hushed rumors, Jeremiah included. But, it seemed, that tale of glory had been crushed under weight of their defeat of _hell on earth_, as his mother had said. There was no one who was rightly sure what had happened that night so many years ago, and if so they were smart enough to keep their mouths shut. Guesses had been made, speculation circulated, but the conclusion was always the same: the chaos and destruction and utter _despair_ had ceased in the blink of an eye, the same moment that the Winchesters were in Stull, the same moment a catastrophic earthquake had ripped through that cemetery and that cemetery alone. When a close hunter friend had raced to that prominent spot, the only thing he had found was the smattering of blood drenched over a few headstones. The bodies of the Winchesters were never recovered.

Jeremiah huffed as he pushed himself away from the desk.

No bodies meant there was nothing left to salt and burn.

v.

Silence silence silence, every moment passing, slipping by, is another moment that nothing has happened, no change, desperation drawn out of him like a keening deep in his chest. He will wait forever if he has to, but he doesn't _have_ forever, he _can't_, he needs so much for this to happen, he'll give anything he has, _anything_--

His head jerks upright, breath coming in harsh pants, stark clarity throbbing through his head so hard he nearly passes out.

He has the ways. And he more than certainly has the means.

He propels himself off the bed, limbs tingling in the sudden movement, more _alive_ and adrenaline-filled than he's felt in days. He scrambles, hands moving deftly through what only a few minutes ago he'd considered junk, all of it, worthless in the wake of death, but now he searches frantically, hands shaking, looking for the one thing worth holding on to in all this shit, nothing more, _nothing_—

There.

Scribbles and utterly useless facts, timelines, ingredients, God, where _was it_—

He stills, and skims the page, the constriction in his chest giving way as he let out a long breath.

He has work to do.

vi.

Jeremiah came to the conclusion that he was born in the wrong era.

Finding out the year, make, and model of the car the Winchesters had used was just another blip on the long list of useless facts he'd gathered over time. They had been just words and numbers to him, no real meaning behind the details. That was, until he saw what the damn thing looked like.

An antique car shop sat just outside of Gladstone, Missouri, and did indeed have 1967 Chevrolet Impala showcased. The man who ran the place looked just as old, but was still as sharp as a tack, and showed Jeremiah around with unmitigated glee, spouting out phrases like _327 small block with dual exhaust and 400 turbo transmission, not to mention the 525 horses on this baby, God, what a beaut_, things that hardly made a lick of sense to him and yet he was instinctively drawn to it, like the automatic response from nearly every red-blooded American male down through the years. Anything was better than the piece-of-shit modes of transportation the market was trying to sell nowadays anyway, but these? Hell if it didn't make Jeremiah want to jump in the nearest one and drive right out through the plexiglass front windows.

And then there, in the corner, sat the Impala.

Velvety blue, dark as midnight, looking as if it had just rolled off the assembly line instead of being nearly a hundred years old. In mint condition, the man said, wrinkled skin around his mouth stretched as he grinned hugely, wouldn't trade this one for anything in the world. Jeremiah studied the leather interior as the man went around back to stroke light fingers across the trunk, saying it was big enough to hold a body.

Jeremiah smirked.

He was starting to grow a little too fond of the Winchesters, maybe.

He wandered around a bit more, thinking how he should have invited Ben to come along, as he loved this kind of stuff. Not so much of a history nerd as Jeremiah was, really, but Ben had this silent appreciative quality of things from the past, especially if it was anything their mother would have remembered or enjoyed herself. He chewed his lip as he glanced inside a smaller, sportier-looking car. Ben had been pretty damn mopey lately, something that Jeremiah had tried to be irritated about but found he couldn't, instead keeping a keen eye on his brother while Ben wasn't paying attention. He really had thought that a little more time would smooth the ache that they'd both been feeling, and Jeremiah hoped like hell that Ben wouldn't up and do something stupid, out of all of this.

Like leaving.

His heart shuddered in his chest as Jeremiah said goodbye to the man, and he walked outside into the bright sunshine, fingers lightly running over the cellphone in his pocket. He'd call Ben, tell him they were going out for the night. At least get a little drinking under their belt, if anything. Good, okay. Anything to help Ben out.

And that was when his phone rang.

vii.

A week it has only been, a week, and it feels like fucking eternity, more desperation and helplessness than he's ever felt in his entire lifetime condensed into such a small space of time. He runs over the list again in his head as he guns the engine, barreling through the dense woodlands, the road narrow. Is he too late? Is there a time limit? What if every single thing he's learned is just one big fucked-up joke, no more than rumors and ghost stories and urban legends, the final punchline now rearing its head and the joke's on him?

It can't. It just _can't_.

Forty-six years ago Dean Winchester raced down the same stretch of lonely road, the same myriad of thoughts eating away at him until he could barely breathe, the mind-numbing desperation ascending above all other rational thought. Forty-six years ago Dean Winchester raced down the same stretch of lonely road with all intents to find the crossroads and barter for his brother's life with his own soul.

Only Jeremiah didn't know that.

He gulps down air as the night gets denser with each stretch of mile he covers. The fog flows and curls, obscuring dully-lit stars and waning moon, obscuring everything but the dusty road that lies before him.

He is close.

He skids to a stop and jumps out, the small tin box wrapped tightly in his hands as he walks. The contents inside rattle with each step Jeremiah takes but he ignores it, looking for the tell-tale yarrow flowers, just like the research and brief note in his notebook had said.

There wasn't exactly a manual on how to barter with a crossroads demon for one's soul and how to deal with each possible outcome, but all things considered Jeremiah figures it's a good thing he's a little fucking over-exuberant when it comes to this shit, otherwise he'd have no idea what to expect. Demons lie, twist, and mangle, can smell desperation from miles away, and use it.

He's not a hunter, never so much as seen a spirit in all the years he's been researching; despite all the lore and warding and rituals he's nothing but an amateur, an outsider looking in. And now, here, an attempt to summon a _demon_… it's stupid, absurd, laughable. Desperate.

Sure enough, the yarrow flowers encircle the edges of the crossroads, and Jeremiah comes to a stop in the dead center of the road. His breath is ragged in his chest and through the fog he can feel a light wind start to stir, swirling the fog around him. The dust at his feet lies compact and still.

One simple act is all it would take. No incantations, no blood, just a little grave for the tin box and he would get what was coming to him.

He drops to his knees.

The second he does, the wind whips violently around him, ruffling his hair and clothes, but still not a speck of dust from the ground is moved. Jeremiah notices then, too, that the scrubby trees scattered around him haven't so much as lost a leaf. He glances around, fingertips tingling in fear and anticipation, but there is nothing but his own short breaths echoing in his ears.

"Okay," he says, hand on the earth. "Okay."

He digs, gravel and dust shoved under his fingernails, the wind rushing by him so hard now he can barely hear anything, and he wonders, maybe, if this something of the demon's doing, inciting fear to mess with his headspace, a little toying around before the real fun begins. It doesn't matter. It'll all be over with soon, anyway.

A sudden pressure builds in his sinuses and the air around him becomes stifling, smothering, a high-pitched whine ringing in his ears all the while, and for a moment he knows he must be hearing things, because the little tin box is nowhere near buried yet, and there's no one out here but him.

_Don't_.

His head whips around, any attempts at tricking himself into bravado now vanished. He's being watched, he can feel it, fucking hell, there's something _out there_.

"W-what," he says breathlessly.

_Don't_, the something says again, more insistently, as the building pressure peaks in his sinuses and dissipates slowly, though not completely receding.

Through his stupor it clicks, and he glances down at the little hole in the earth, the tin box waiting beside it to be buried.

"No," Jeremiah says, though it's hardly a whisper. "I have to do this. I _have_ to."

_You're wrong_, it says, filtering in through the density of the night, and Jeremiah's eyes squint shut in pain and anger.

"Don't _tell me that_," he whispers fiercely, and shoves the tin box in the dirt.

The air around him explodes like the release of a static charge, the air crackling, and Jeremiah nearly doubles over as the pressure in his head becomes a cacophony in his ears, the wind nearing a gale force around him. He only has a brief moment to wonder what in the hell he's done exactly, when it all stops just as quickly as it started.

He goes from rubbing painful temples to startled eyes as he looks up and sees two figures standing before him.

Not _figures_, not exactly. Wisps, like a glinting of light off the fog, the mist of which curls around them, blurring edges and making them look like—

"Holy Jesus," Jeremiah musters in a short breath, eyes wide.

The shorter of the two smirks (Christ _almighty_ he didn't even know which one was which, couldn't even tell), a curious look on such a form, and Jeremiah hears, _Not quite_.

The two turn their heads then, simultaneously, and Jeremiah follows to see a stunning brunette in an equally stunning black dress walking toward him.

"Jeremiah," she purrs, her voice like poisoned honey. "What a pleasant surprise. Brothers seem to be becoming regular customers, it seems. We all know how that previous sob story ended, right boys?" She turns to them, the Winchesters, and Jeremiah is so caught up with the fact that they're _there_, right in front him, and the fact that he summoned an honest to God _demon_ that he thinks he might puke.

They stand still in the twisting fog, facing her with equally blank faces, the corners of their mouths turned upward slightly.

"I'm here to make a deal," Jeremiah says, breaking the silence, his voice shaking.

_No_, says another voice. The taller of the two, then. _You're not_.

"You have _no_ authority here," the demon hisses, and it's obvious she's more terrified than angry. "_I_ call the shots, not you!" The shorter Winchester cocks his head, as if amused.

_Not anymore_.

Black smoke pours out of her mouth in a cloud and Jeremiah steps back, looking up dumbstruck, watching as the oily cloud seeps into the ground and leaves behind no trace. His eyes come up to the girl, who staggers for only a moment, and then suddenly straightens, her eyes a deep green as she stares at him.

"Show's over, no more to see," she says in an unexpectedly rough voice and motions with a nod the way Jeremiah came. "Go home, kid."

"_No_," Jeremiah replies vehemently, his stomach still rolling. "My brother, I can't—"

"You can," she gruffly interrupts, and only then does Jeremiah notice that the taller of the two is standing off to the side. Alone. "You may think you're doing everyone involved a favor, but trust me, you're not."

"Personal experience?" Jeremiah grits out, close to trembling. "Or is it just the fact that even after you both bit the dust you're still on some crusade to save every damn person you can?" She just shrugs, smirking slightly.

"A little of both."

"I can still come back here," Jeremiah says. "I can still come here and get him back."

"Then we'll meet again." The green eyes flick over to the taller figure standing calmly in the mist, and then back to him. "And a little piece of advice for you: just stick to the history books, kid."

No rush of black smoke, no scream accompanying the green eyes fading to brown, just the girl standing in front of him suddenly slumping forward and Jeremiah jumping to catch her, lowering them both slowly to the ground.

When he looks up, they're gone.

viii.

He lies in his bed in his silent apartment for nearly two days.

Not much else to do, seeing as how his attempt at selling his soul to a demon was waylaid.

He could just as easily sit and watch the dust collect on his brother's things, think about the word _loss_ and how absurdly sudden these things happen, throw off all interest he had in things _before_.

Funny, the things that used to interest him.

He gets up slowly, as if in a daze, and pads on rough carpet to his makeshift study, the rows and rows of books still intact, notebooks and papers scattered about where he'd left them however long ago now.

Except….

A smaller, thick book rests on his Latin translations notebook, one that Jeremiah's sure he's never seen before.

He makes his way slowly over, his heart giving a little jump, and sees that it's not a book at all.

A barely legible note sits on top of the leather-bound journal, and Jeremiah squints to read, _Just stick to the history books_.

He lets out a breath, the corners of his mouth involuntary turning upwards, and flips open to the first page.


End file.
